The Grip (6 page)

Sudden blackness descended and then intense movement. He was moving at the speed of light. Trees and houses flickered by. Below him appeared two men standing in a dark living room. The shorter one buttoned up in a yellow cardigan and bent over to slide his feet into a pair of slippers. But the other didn’t feel like a man at all. It felt more like a shadow pretending to be a man: something terrible hidden inside a shroud of blackness. The shadow turned and seemed to look up at him. A lump of charcoal without a single distinguishing feature… except its eyes. They were milky white and cold, like two distant stars in the vastness of space. A glimmer of light was refracted from the shadow’s inside pocket. There was something there. Something metallic and shiny. The handle of a knife? Lysander wondered, a sharp chill shooting through his veins.

The shorter man in the yellow cardigan motioned and walked into the kitchen. The shadow followed, leaving part of a shoe print behind, as if it had stepped in mud outside and was tracking it through the house. Panic gripped Lysander. Couldn’t this guy see he had let a monster into his house? It wasn’t trying to sell him a subscription to
Sports Illustrated
or get him to change his long-distance carrier. This thing, whatever it was, meant to kill him and Lysander was powerless to do anything about it.

The kitchen door swung open and the two men walked into the living room laughing, the thin man with the cardigan first. They stopped by the fireplace. Then the dark man cupped the other’s face. The man in the cardigan squirmed uneasily and then settled, his eyes blinking with mute expectation. They’re about to kiss, Lysander thought, puzzled. Then suddenly, the smaller man’s eyes grew wide with terror and he reached for the shadow, only to have the shadow slip away and crumple to the ground. Now only the man in the cardigan was standing, but there was something different about him. Even from far away Lysander could see the difference, but didn’t quite believe it. His eyes had become milky white. Somehow, the shadow had snuck into him like a fox in a henhouse. Cardigan leaned over the shadow-man, fell into his coat and removed a long blade. Lysander watched with morbid fascination, utterly perplexed by the display. The thin man rolled up his sleeves and brought the blade to his wrists. He began sawing viciously. A stream of blood gushed out and the man screamed, but the sound was not one of pain, but one of orgasm. He moved to his other wrist. The top button of his shirt was undone. He reached up with both bloody hands and ripped six buttons off so that his shirt flapped open. With the edge of the knife, he carved something into his chest, something Lysander couldn’t quite make out.

The floor at his feet was now slick with blood. He shuffled over to the table, careful not to slip on any of it and reached for a strange-looking bust. Lifting it in the air, he paused for a moment, admiring it, and then brought it arcing down onto his own face, crushing the bridge of his nose, releasing a fan of blood and bone. The bust rose and fell, again and again, until there was nothing recognizable of the man left. A stranger was destroying himself before Lysander’s very eyes. He was utterly disgusted by the spectacle before him. But Lysander couldn’t turn away.

There was a crater now where the man’s forehead once was. Shrieking, the man staggered and then collapsed to his knees. It was finally over, Lysander hoped, but he was wrong. The thin man’s fingers crawled up his face to where he could look at them and plunged them into the soft tissue between his eyeball and what remained of his nose. There was a sound like boiled eggs being plucked from their shell. He pulled his hands free and Lysander could see he was holding something in each hand. They were jiggling in his grasp. He had plucked out his own eyes, Lysander realized with horror. Dangling down the man’s blood-stained forearms like sinewy bits of rope were his optic nerves. At last, he collapsed and lay still.

Lysander suddenly felt an intense chill grip him. A gray mist began forming on the floor. The ghost, the creature, whatever the hell it was, was leaving the thin man’s corpse and moving purposely toward the other form lying prostrate on the floor. They united and the fingers of the shadow’s left hand began to do a subtle dance. The movement went up to his arm, then to his head. He propped himself up on his shoulder, admiring his work. Suddenly, the shadow’s head snapped in Lysander’s direction. His head perked up and for a moment it seemed as though he was sniffing the air. Sniffing for a scent he had found floating past him in the breeze.

Invisible icy tentacles began snaking out, probing blindly like something used to dark and damp places.

Lysander began to back away, but the tentacles were closing in.

Just then he felt another presence, a sound. He tried listening in spite of his gnawing fear. It sounded like a wolf, snarling low, vicious and threatening.

The tentacles approached and the growling turned to vicious snapping. Lysander swore he could hear the sound of jaws clamping shut, gnashing at dead air.

Someone was calling his name. Lysander… Lysander… Lysander. Sudden movement. Then blackness and pain. The pain racked his whole body with such intensity he couldn’t remember when he ever felt anything so real. His eyes opened to a dim room. Dim was good. Anything was better than orange. Later he would remember only flashes.

Samantha was above him, talking to him softly.

Malice
available for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, Apple.

To contact Griffin Hayes or to read samples of his other work, visit his blog:

http://griffin-hayes.blogspot.com/

An excerpt from
Bird of Prey
by Griffin Hayes.

T
ommy ‘the tank’ Hodgkins skidded his Firebird into Lucky Lonie’s parking lot going about twenty miles faster than he really should have been. The Bird’s tires locked in a high c before they kicked up a thick rubbery cloud of smoke.

Buck Sanders was pacing out in front of Lonie’s, oblivious to the fact that Tommy nearly sent him careening over the hood, off the windshield and into a thicket of Yellow Cedar.

A shaft of sunlight had come down through the trees, illuminating Buck like a spotlight. On the door, Tommy could see the sign to the bar was flipped to CLOSED. Buck’s balding head was slick with sweat. On his skull, three mosquitoes were sucking away merrily. A surprising sight coming from a man who took such immense pleasure in squashing those ‘little bastards’ dead whenever he could.

Buck came to his open window.

“So where is this thing?” Tommy asked.

“Stay right there, we’re going to Keisel’s.”

There was a blood stained hanky wrapped around Buck’s left hand.

“The Keisel steel factory?” Tommy asked. “What on earth for? It’s abandoned.”

Buck threw him a look that people do when they’re not in the mood to repeat themselves and crossed to the passenger side door and climbed inside, mosquitoes and all.

“Take the A3,” Buck began, pulling a hand across his forehead and wiping it on the leg of his jeans. “It’s quicker. Get off just before Harmond Avenue and hang three rights. Steel Works is a big bitch, can’t miss her.”

Tommy pulled out and headed for the A3.

“That where you left it?” Tommy finally inquired when they hit the interstate. He could practically see the whirlwind of thoughts tussling around inside Buck’s head. Buck nodded absently.

“Buck, I gotta ask. What in hell’s name were you doing over there in the first place?”

“The leak was getting real bad…”

“Huh?”

“I was gone to get siding to fix the leak in the roof.”

Lonie’s was certainly no Taj Mahal; this Tommy knew without a doubt, but metal siding, ripped from an abandoned steel factory? The place was already on its way to looking like something out of a 1930’s shanty town, it sure as hell didn’t need any help.

“Buck, I’ve never seen you like this in all the time I’ve known you.”

Buck looked at him and then fell into a moody silence, his face the color of raw chicken. Something had the old man scared bad.

When Tommy wasn’t tending bar at Lonie’s, he and Buck were usually out hunting or dreaming up quick and easy ways to strike it rich. But in all that time the strangest thing they ever came across was a five legged deer: nothing any self-respecting cryptozoologist would even blink twice at. And even the deer they had let amble back into the thick brush that day, partly because, as Buck had put it, ‘when mother nature fucks up that bad, it’s best to leave the poor thing be; she’ll have a hard enough time getting on without two yahoos trying to blast it to bits.’

The sudden sound of Buck’s voice startled Tommy. “First time I seen the thing, I didn’t think much of it. Looked to me like one of them birds… like an eagle. Wingspan eight, maybe nine feet. And it was circlin’ overhead, right above me, the way eagles tend to when they’re lookin’ for somethin’ to eat.”

“No shortage of rats at Keisel’s,” Tommy said, “that’s for sure.”

Buck glared at him with frightening intensity. “Damn right! And that’s when it hit me that something was wrong. Where the heck were the other birds? I mean, I can’t remember ever seeing less than a dozen bald eagles flyin’ over the steel works.”

Tommy exited the A3 and made a right.

“At the time,” Buck said, “I tried not to give it too much thought. Jesus, I’m no small man, Tommy.” Buck’s forearms were flexing almost on queue, the muscles in his arms bunching up like taught cords. “There’s not a lot of worrying needs to be done when a bird looks like its eyeing me for dinner. Matter of fact, at the time I was sure it was lookin’ for something else, like some dumb squirrel that had got its head stuck in a hole somewhere.

“So I got my crowbar with me and I’m jimmying a nice piece of paneling off one of those small depot sheds when my hand slips and I slice a strip the size of Bethany Elroy’s ass crack.” Buck held the outer edge of his left hand in the air. The blood-stained hanky fluttered into his lap. It looked to Tommy like a shrapnel wound from one of those fancy Hollywood war movies: a jagged and meaty gash dripping red. But there was something else there as well. Something that made Tommy’s mouth go dry. Stitched in a crescent pattern on the back of Buck’s hand and across his palm was a set of teeth marks. At least they looked like teeth marks, but not from any set of jaws Tommy had ever seen. Hundreds of tiny pinpricks set neatly in a curved line.

Tommy’s attention snapped back to the road and he realized with a jolt of panic he had wandered over into the oncoming lane. The tires squealed as he veered back. “Buck, your hand!”

Buck studied his hand, turning it over in his lap as though he were trying on a pair of expensive gloves. “It was right after I sliced her open that I heard this scream, high pitched like a woman’s scream, but from far away and when I looked up that thing was diving down at me, wings folded. Its eyes blazing. Two blood red chili peppers is what they looked like. There was something cold about them. Something prehistoric.” Buck drew a fresh hanky out of his back pocket and held it against the wound. “It was the blood, Tommy. I didn’t realize at the time, but it was the blood that it smelled.”

“Like a shark,” Tommy said, feeling suddenly not so sure about what he was getting himself into.

“Truth be told, I wanted to run. I won’t bullshit you, Tommy. We’ve known each other too long for that. I wanted to run so bad I could feel my legs twitching under me, but it felt like one of those dreams, where your legs are pumping like hell but you’re not going anywhere. I’m telling you this, Tommy, cause I trust you’ll never breath a goddamn word of it so long as you live. But facts are facts and the fact is, I nearly crapped in my pants. Happened so fast too, only real memory I have is putting my arm into the air, like for protection. And then it slammed into me, latching onto my arm, sending me ass backwards into the dirt.” Buck looked down at his hand.

“Those fingers it had were long and thin with pointed claws and its feet were just the same, like one of those orangutans. And all over its body were wispy grey feathers… and the smell. God awful. Like when they found Jed Peterson in his favorite recliner, dead nearly a month. Maggots crawling all over his face.”

Tommy could feel Buck’s eyes burrowing into him. “But it was the mouth that I remember most…”

Tommy made another right and in the distance he could see the very tip of the abandoned Keisel steel factory, looming above the tree tops. His eyes made a quick scan, but the sky above it was empty.

Buck followed Tommy’s eyes and then fell back to his throbbing hand. “That’s when it bit me. And I’ll guarantee, you’ve never felt pain like that in your life. Like a thousand tetanus shots all at once. Its jaw latched on as if I was holding a piece of steak out to a vulture.

“I screamed, Tommy. I’m not afraid to admit that. Maybe for the first time since I was a little pissant in diapers, I screamed and I wasn’t gonna stop until I felt the cold steel of that crowbar still in my other hand and I brought it down as hard as I could. I was aiming for the thing’s head you see, but you have to understand, it didn’t really have a head, not like you and I at least. Its head came out of its shoulders, almost like a moth. Hell, a lot like a moth. A giant moth with red eyes and two sets of hands.”

Part II

‘Introductions All Around’

T
he Keisel Steel Works’ main building looked like a red barn on steroids. It rose into the sky nearly two hundred feet. Six smoke stacks jutted from the roof in a neat line. Around this main building were a collection of hodgepodge structures, some of them large enough to park a fleet of Buick Eldorados, others no bigger than an outhouse, and yet everything here bore the unmistakable aura of decay. Seventy brutal Alaska winters have a nasty habit of doing that to a place. Tommy and Buck walked along a gravel path strewn with debris; bits of rusted piping, metal girders. There was even a porcelain toilet propped up against a wall, a healthy crack right down the middle.